Medjugorje Message: November 25, 2017
Dear children! In this time of grace, I call you to prayer. Pray and seek peace, little children. He who came here on earth to give you His peace, regardless of who you are and what you are—He, my Son, your Brother—through me is calling you to conversion, because without God you do not have a future or eternal life. Therefore, believe and pray and live in grace and in the expectation of your personal meeting with Him. Thank you for having responded to my call.
River of Light
December 2017
Advent is the Church’s special season of contemplative waiting through the long, dark winter hours, in expectant hope and silent anticipation of the coming of the Light of Christ into the world: both the memorial of his coming in the flesh in Bethlehem, and his future coming at the end of earthly life in its present form. Our Lady’s Advent message, as always, calls us to PRAYER “in this time of grace.” She says, “Pray and seek peace, little children. He who came here on earth to give you His peace, regardless of who you are or what you are—He, my Son, your Brother—through me is calling you to conversion, because without God you do not have a future or eternal life.” Here in this one sentence, Our Lady gives us a whole theology of the Incarnation.
She is making it clear that, as St. Athanasius said of the feast we celebrate at Christmas: “God became man so that man might become God.” Scripture says the Word became flesh to make us “partakers of the divine nature.” (2 Pet 1:4) Our “future” and our “eternal life” depend upon what the early Church Fathers called “divinization” or “deification“—the process of our spiritual journey from the fallen human condition into which we’re born to the heavenly life of being “in Christ” through the oneness of unity consciousness. This great fruit of divinization—eternal life in God—is the outcome of CONVERSION. “Conversion” means changing the direction in which we look for happiness: abandoning the bogus worldly programs of our lower, egoic, unevolved False Self that is fixated on the safety and security of our reptilian “lizard brain” (brain stem); the codependent affection and esteem of our “warm, furry mammal brain” (limbic cortex); and the power and control of our rationalizing, wordy “monkey mind” (neocortex).
While these three facets of our human development are still present in our evolutionary brain and daily affecting our behavior, we are called, by virtue of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ who was both fully God and fully human, to rise above and transcend these lower brain structures of our biology that manifest “original sin”—the general sinfulness of our “human condition.” We are called to ascend with Christ to the “soul” or “True Self” level of Spirit that can live forever in heaven. This “deified” or “divinized” consciousness through which we can say with St. Paul, “I live now, no longer I, but Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:20) is the ultimate state of abiding “PEACE that passes understanding.” (Phil 4:7) This “new” structure in our brain (the next step in human evolution?) is accessed and developed specifically through silent meditation, as evidenced by recent neuroscientific brain-mapping studies (e.g. contemplative monks during states of deep prayer). Thus Our Lady’s relentless repetition of “Pray, pray, pray!” for the past 36 years in Medjugorje may be seen as our engraved invitation from heaven to take the next step on the evolutionary ladder of human consciousness, toward “divinization”!
Notice that Our Lady says her Son “came here on earth to give you His peace, regardless of who you are and what you are.” The first “epiphany” of this truth was the visit of the three Gentile Magi (kings or astrologers) from the east who were drawn to search out the infant Jesus by the guidance of a star, thus revealing that Christ had indeed come for ALL peoples and nations—not just for Israel. St. Paul said that in Christ there is “neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male and female, for all are ONE in Christ Jesus.” (Gal 3:28) But can we hear Our Lady’s words deeply, with open mind and heart, when she says her Son’s gift is given “regardless of who or what you are”? Can we hear the truth that today—right here, right now—in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, woman nor man, black nor white, gay nor straight, Muslim nor Christian, rich nor poor, healthy nor sick, liberal nor conservative, native citizen nor immigrant, etc.? Can we accept that every dualism and conflicting pair of opposites we argue about is completely shattered and irrelevant in the light of the surpassing love and peace of Christ—the Divine Indwelling Presence of God in all life forms? All people on this planet are called to the “unity consciousness” of divinization, regardless of what “membership group” they may belong to!
In Our Lady’s monthly message to Mirjana on November 2, she said, “My Son is love. He loves all people without difference, all people of all countries and of all nations. If you, my children, would live the love of my Son, His kingdom would already be on earth.” This message confirms that we are indeed called to build the heavenly kingdom here and now on this earth—not simply wait apathetically for “pie in the sky when we die,” or lose ourselves in fantasies and imaginings of our “escape strategy” from this world. This is why Jesus taught us to pray, “THY KINGDOM COME…on EARTH as it is in heaven”! Both heaven and earth are to be LOVE. In every moment of life we may ask, “What would LOVE look like in this moment?“
Our Lady’s message ends with an Advent focus on the coming of Christ: “Believe and pray and live in grace and the expectation of your personal meeting with Him.” When will Christ come again? is a classic Advent question. We tend to fixate upon the past coming of Jesus in Bethlehem, or the future coming at the endtime of earth history, but Fr. Richard Rohr gives us another avenue of reflection: “Whenever the material and the spiritual coincide, there is the Christ. Jesus fully accepted that human-divine identity and walked it into history. Henceforth, the Christ ‘comes again’ whenever we are able to see the spiritual and the material coexisting, in any moment, in any event, and in any person. All matter reveals Spirit, and Spirit needs matter to ‘show itself’! The ‘Second Coming of Christ’ happens whenever and wherever we allow this to be utterly true for us. This is how God continually breaks into history; even before the first Stone Age, humans stood in awe and wonder, gazing at the stars.”
May we all live deeply this holy season of Advent with great silence, prayer, and contemplative yearning for the conversion of heart that prepares us to receive the Light of Christ’s coming in the shining, mundane moments of our material reality and the glories of our commonplace world. May we experience a peace-filled readiness for a “personal meeting with Him,” both in everyday life and at the hour of our death and birth to eternity.
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God could have chosen to break upon the scene of human history to save us from our selves in any way he wanted. It could have been in a way that was grand and glorious and terrifying. He could have put on a fantastic show. But he chose instead to create a vessel that could cradle his greatness—he chose to be borne by and born of a woman. The glory that happens in the womb of a woman may be God’s best show of all. And the idea that our salvation is born in a world that scarcely knows it has a reason to hope? That God is working out the salvation of the world in secret ways with a woman as his only companion? What deep, rich grace there is in that! —Colleen Mitchell
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The presence of God in His world as its Creator depends on no one but Him. His presence in the world as Man depends, in some measure, upon men. Not that we can do anything to change the mystery of the Incarnation in itself: but we are able to decide whether we ourselves, and that portion of the world which is ours, shall become aware of His presence consecrated by it, and transfigured in its light. We have the choice of two identities: the external mask which seems to be real and lives for the brief moment of earthly existence, and the hidden, inner person who seems to us to be nothing, but who can give himself eternally to the truth in whom he subsists. It is this inner self that is taken up into the mystery of Christ, by His love, by the Holy Spirit, so that in secret we live “in Christ.” —Thomas Merton, OCSO
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Don’t settle for less than the truth of your Christ-self. The ego-self, with which we are all familiar, is a small cramped place when compared with the spaciousness of our true self-in-Christ. This is the self that is not only at one within itself; it is at one with the world, and with all others who share it as their world. It is, therefore, one with Ultimate Reality. —David Benner
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When we meditate, we enter the mind of Christ from the ground up. We settle into the mystery of the concrete immediacy of our breathing and our bodily being. We are quietly attentive to the thoughts and feelings that arise, endure, and pass away within us. Sitting in this way, we do not fly off into an eternal realm. Rather, we enter into the mind of Christ, which knows the concrete immediacy of ourselves just as we are. There are not two minds of Christ, one human and the other divine. Rather, the mind of Christ is the realized oneness of the divine and all that we are as human beings. Who we are in Christ is in no way reducible to our everyday, ordinary self. Nor is who we are in Christ in any way other than our ordinary self.
Sometimes we might believe that we are meditating to open ourselves to some kind of extraordinary experience beyond what we are accustomed to in our day-to-day life. But as the spiritual journey continues to deepen, it comes full circle back to where we started. We get up in the morning and touch our feet to the floor. And we know that this ordinary experience of this utterly ordinary event is the mystery of oneness with God manifesting itself in and as this very ordinariness. This is why we sit in meditation: so that we might settle into this ordinary mind; so that in becoming, at last, just ourselves, we might realize our eternal oneness with God. —James Finley
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We will never find peace in the midst of our worries and problems by thinking our way through them. Thought is a false labyrinth that always returns us to the same confused starting point. Prayer is the true labyrinth that takes us deeper than thought and leads us to the peace that “passes all understanding.” Letting go of our anxieties is our greatest difficulty, which testifies to the resilience of the ego. Yet it is so simple. We have only to grasp the true nature of meditation: not that we are trying to think of nothing, but that we are not thinking.
In many ancient labyrinths it was a monster that was found at the center, a thing of fear. The Christian labyrinths positioned Christ at the center of all the twists and turns of life. In Christ we find the dissolving of fear in the final certainty of love. Meditation is the work of love and it is by love, not by thought, that God is ultimately known. Our human experience of love is the best way to understand why we meditate and how meditation takes us into reality.
We all pass through cycles: enthusiasm, struggle with discipline, dryness, despair, temporary enlightenments. The center of the labyrinth is our true home; the flashes of joy and awakenings are emanations of the love that is the nature of reality. An attitude of nonpossessiveness and trust develops to replace greed and fear. With this comes a more unshakeable peace. Underlying all turbulence, this peace flows from the knowledge that we are known. With time it brings us to the authentic poverty where we learn simply to be. This empowers us to endure more setbacks and disappointments along the way. Even when we seem to be regressing, growth is happening if there is faith at work. In the darkest night an invisible light still shines. —Fr. Laurence Freeman, OSB
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Language is so weak in explaining the fullness of the mystery. That is why the absolute silence of meditation is so supremely important. We do not try to think of God, talk to God or imagine God. We stay in that awesome silence open to the eternal silence of God. We discover in meditation, through practice and experience, that this is the natural ambience for all of us. We are created for this and our being flourishes and expands in that eternal silence.
“Silence” as a word, however, perhaps deters many people, because it suggests the deprivation of sound or language. People fear that the silence of meditation is regressive. But experience teaches us that the silence of prayer is not a pre-linguistic but a post-linguistic state. Language has completed its task, pointing us through and beyond itself and the whole realm of mental consciousness. The eternal silence is not deprived of anything, nor does it deprive us of anything. It is the silence of love, of unqualified and unconditional acceptance. We know ourselves to be loved and so we love. Meditation is about completing this cycle of love. Open to the Spirit who dwells in our hearts, silently loving us all…there is always a new beginning to the eternal dance of being-in-love. —Fr. John Main, OSB
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Wisdom from Pope Francis
God never gives someone a gift they are not capable of receiving. If he gives us the gift of Christmas, it is because we all have the ability to understand and receive it. Christmas is joy, an inner joy of light and peace.
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Mark Your Calendar
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To reject the contemplative dimension of any religion is to reject the religion itself, however loyal one may be to its externals and rituals. This is because the contemplative dimension is the heart and soul of every religion. It initiates the movement into higher states of consciousness. The great wisdom teachings of the Vedas, Upanishads, Buddhist Sutras, Old and New Testaments, and the Koran bear witness to this truth. Right now there are about two billion Christians on the planet. If a significant portion of them were to embrace the contemplative dimension of the gospel, the emerging global society would experience a powerful surge toward enduring peace. If this contemplative dimension of the Christian religion is not presented, the Gospel is not being adequately preached.
– Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO
